permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 12:55 AM, Bob Waldrop <bob@bobwaldrop.net> wrote:
> Cuba is often touted as a permaculture success story, the DGR book has
> some interesting contrarian figures that perhaps those with more
> knowledge of what actually happened in Cuba during the "special period"
> could maybe comment on.
>
> +  The per capita diet for most people dropped to about 1,850 calories/day.
> + For children and the elderly, 1,450 calories/day.
> + Protein dropped by 40%, to 15-20 grams/day (less than an ounce).
> + Dietary fat dropped by 64%.
> + Vitamin A by 67%.
> + 50,000 Cubans were afflicted with a mysterious malady, a team of
> physicians from the Pan American Health Organization diagnosed it as
> "neuropathy due to spare diet with great physical exertion".
> + The basic ration was rice, sugar, potatoes, beans, 12 eggs a month,
> every 15 days 1/2 pound of beef mixed with soy or 1 pound of chicken,
> children got some milk.
> + The direct maternal mortality increased by 60%.
> + The mortality rate of the elderly increased by 20%.
>

Who knows whether those statistics are correct or not. Google could help.

> The book has footnotes for these statistics, I am not qualified to
> comment on them.
>
> Actually, I am not surprised that the more frail members of the
> population died, and that pregnant women were particularly impacted.
> Cuba went through an almost complete decline in fossil fuel
> availability, the miracle is that more people did not die, and more
> people were not crippled by malnutrition.
>
> I am sure more "normal" relationships with the United States would have
> reduced the impact of this or in fact ameliorated it entirely.  Yet, I
> am not sure what normal relationships with the United States really
> offers the Cuban people.  Will they be better off with US corporations
> setting up shop, dismantling the Cuban health care system in favor of a
> US style system, flooding their markets with cheap schlock and driving
> the locals out of business in favor of franchises imported from the
> United States.  Will opening their markets to Twinkies, Rice Chex, and
> frozen meat-like substances really be the answer to malnutrition?  Part
> of me wishes I could go to the international meeting there, to see the
> situation on the ground, but that is waaay too far for me to travel even
> if I could afford it which I can't, lol.

Very interesting issue. Of course, narmalization of relations with
Cuba _could_ mean
simply allowing foreign investment (those the Cubans approve of) and
removing the travel ban.
Also worthwhile would be making it easier for individuals and
organizations to raise money to
perform services and implement projects that benefit Cuba, in a
permaculture and natural agriculture way.
Walk before running. Create a US-Cuba research and development group
that designs and implements projects of this sort
and defines economic investments that would not be allowed in Cuba,
i.e. no gmo, none of any class of pesticides.
Put in place on a grand scale education and technology and
low-appropriate-technology exchange programs.
Raise money to hire permaculture and natural agriculture experts and
teachers to revitalize Cuban food production,
stabilize its environment and all fragile ecological zones and bring
permaculture to the lives of all Cubans while showing them how to use
it to
sustain their communities and neighborhoods. Those things for starters.

LL